autoconfig - Thunderbird AutoConfig protocol

Name Description config-v1.1.xml See also

Name

autoconfig — Thunderbird AutoConfig protocol

Description

AutoConfig is a HTTP-based discovery protocol, originally introduced for Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 in 2009. It is quite similar to autodiscover(7). This manual page is not normative.

TB tries a bunch of URLs, with HTTP GET:

	•		https://autoconfig.<DOMAINPART>/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=<EMAILADDRESS>
	•		http://autoconfig.<DOMAINPART>/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=<EMAILADDRESS>
	•		https://<DOMAINPART>/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=<EMAILADDRESS>
	•		http://<DOMAINPART>/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=<EMAILADDRESS>
	•		DNS SRV lookups are not performed.

Note that TLS wildcard certificates do not extend to more than one level; for example, if the e-mail address is ‘[email protected]‘, and the m1 host presents a server certificates for ‘CN=example.com, subjAltName=*.example.com‘, clients that are trying to download ‘autoconfig.m1.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml‘ may fail TLS verification. The Thunderbird setup wizard does not show TLS failures, and silently treats it as an unavailable resource.

TB also performs AutoDiscover.

config-v1.1.xml

incomingServers may be of type "imap", "pop3", "nntp" or "exchange".